BY LAURA MILLER| For a guy who rarely leaves his own block, Toru Okada, the decent, if hapless, hero of Haruki Murakami's new novel, "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle," has a lot of adventures. At the book's beginning, he's left his job as a paralegal and spends his days reading and cooking dinner for his magazine editor wife. First, an obscene phone call from a woman who seems to know him awfully well disrupts his sleepy routine. Then he meets Malta Kano, an enigmatic psychic who's supposedly searching for his lost cat; her sister, Creta, who dresses like Jackie Kennedy and relates a life history of overwhelming physical pain, attempted suicide, prostitution and a traumatic encounter with Toru's sinister brother-in-law, Noboru Wataya; Lt. Mamiya, a WWII vet who tells him of the atrocities he witnessed on the Mongolian front and Soviet prison camps; and, eventually, an extremely well-dressed mother-son duo who introduce him to an unusual way of making lots of cash. When he needs a break, he pals around with the 16-year-old girl who lives down the street -- or mulls things over while sitting at the bottom of a dry well behind a vacant house.

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With their scalpel-sharp prose and unflinching gaze, the stories in Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures introduce a powerful new voice in Canadian fiction.

In Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures, Vincent Lam holds in delicate and skillful tension black humour, investigations of both common and extraordinary moral dilemmas, and a sometimes shockingly realistic and matter-of-fact portrait of today’s medical profession.

He brings to vivid and convincing life the disparate but interdependent worlds of school and home, heartbreaking young love and life-altering fear in stories that introduce us to Fitz, Ming, Chen, and Sri, young medical school students and doctors in Toronto.

In “How To Get Into Medical School,” the impulsive Fitz and the ultra-rational Ming explore the possibilities of a relationship that is tested, first by the vigilance of a disapproving family and then by the extraordinary commitment demanded of medical students. In “Take All of Murphy,” three students face the challenge of their first dissection of a corpse — and the unusual quandary of deciding whether following the anatomy textbook or keeping a tattoo intact is more important. And in “A Long Migration,” perhaps the most lyrical of the stories, we see beyond Chen’s immediate world into the past of his family, and in particular that of his grandfather. Once a high-living and flamboyant member of the Chinese expatriate community in Saigon before the Vietnam War, now Percival Chen is dying in a Brisbane retirement home, and his grandson’s modern medical recommendations must make way for older potions that arrive for Percival from an older world.

Riveting and precise, Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures looks with rigorous honesty at the specificities of the lives of doctors and their patients and brings us to a deeper understanding of the challenges and temptations that surge around us all.

Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures is an astonishing literary debut, a collection of mature and intricate stories connected through the relationships that develop among a group of young doctors as they move from the challenges of med school to the intense world of emergency rooms, evac missions, and terrifying new viruses.

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In this rare work of public disclosure, filmmaker David Lynch describes his personal methods of capturing and working with ideas, and the immense creative benefits he has experienced from the practice of meditation.

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The "Loki" hardcover was incredible. Some of the paintings were a little muddy but overall the story and art were both topnotch.
I recently bought a new copy of "Geek Love" since my ex stole my last one.

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Odd Thomas by Dean Koonz. This was a amazing and powerful novel. Had me gripped the whole time and the ending just moved me. Very sad. I had never read Koonz before, i've always been a King fan. Will definitely be reading the sequel Forever Odd. I just might have to look into other Koonz novels. Any suggestions?

Also I would like to recommend a hilarious and brilliant work of art titled:

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Just got all five "Hitchhikers" books by D.Adams, recently read I am legend which was short but sweet,
Over the next few months ive got to get through about three "barker" books that I got for xmas including imagika and The Great and Secret Show , which i can't wait for after recently reading Weaveworld again..awesome

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Odd Thomas by Dean Koonz. This was a amazing and powerful novel. Had me gripped the whole time and the ending just moved me. Very sad. I had never read Koonz before, i've always been a King fan. Will definitely be reading the sequel Forever Odd. I just might have to look into other Koonz novels. Any suggestions?

Odd Thomas and Forever Odd are great books. Koontz just put out a third: Brother Odd. Still in hard cover and kind of expensive, but I bought it anyway. I use Borders like a libary a lot - I'll buy a hard cover, read it and return it for the cash or get another hard cover and repeat the process. Fear Nothing and Seize the Night are also good reads, and like the Odd books are about the same character. Most of Koontz's earlier books are straight up thrillers with some horror mixed in, while his later books contain a uplifting message about life and death, and how (mostly) ordinary people deal with extrodinary events. He can sometimes be boarderline religious (in a nondenominational way) preachy, but I don't think he's trying to convert anyone...just trying to let everyone know they should be a little nicer.

Oh yeah, and he used to be pretty damn bald and sport a cheesy porn star mustache way back when, but know he's wearing a wig. It was right about the time he changed his appearence that he changed his writing style. Just something to think about.

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Odd Thomas and Forever Odd are great books. Koontz just put out a third: Brother Odd. Still in hard cover and kind of expensive, but I bought it anyway. I use Borders like a libary a lot - I'll buy a hard cover, read it and return it for the cash or get another hard cover and repeat the process. Fear Nothing and Seize the Night are also good reads, and like the Odd books are about the same character. Most of Koontz's earlier books are straight up thrillers with some horror mixed in, while his later books contain a uplifting message about life and death, and how (mostly) ordinary people deal with extrodinary events. He can sometimes be boarderline religious (in a nondenominational way) preachy, but I don't think he's trying to convert anyone...just trying to let everyone know they should be a little nicer.

Oh yeah, and he used to be pretty damn bald and sport a cheesy porn star mustache way back when, but know he's wearing a wig. It was right about the time he changed his appearence that he changed his writing style. Just something to think about.

I love Koontz, but the Odd Thomas series is terrible! It's annoying! I read the first two and that was enough for me. Besides the great ending of Odd Thomas it was a drag. The second one was pointless...

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I love Koontz, but the Odd Thomas series is terrible! It's annoying! I read the first two and that was enough for me. Besides the great ending of Odd Thomas it was a drag. The second one was pointless...

Am I the only person to find Koontz repetitive? Many of his writings follow the same structure. It is rather annoying, as stated.